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Monday, June 19, 2017

Rapist Lee Kaplan And His Amish Victims

On Thursday, June 16, 2016, officers with the Lower Southampton Township Police Department, operating on a children-in-danger tip, visited the home of 51-year-old Lee Kaplan. Mr. Kaplan resided in the eastern Pennsylvania town of Feasterville located in Bucks County twenty miles northeast of Philadelphia. When the police officers entered the Kaplan dwelling they encountered twelve girls, ages six months to eighteen. Several of the children responded by running about the house in panic searching for places to hide.

When questioned by the police, Lee Kapan explained why the girls were living in his house. In 2012, a former Amish couple from the Lancaster County town of Quarryville named David and Salvilla Stoltzfus, in return for money from Kaplan to help the couple keep their farm, gave him their 14-year-old daughter. Mr. Kaplan and the Stoltzfuses were partners in a metalwork business in Quarryville.

According to Mr. Kaplan, since 2012, he and the Stoltzfus teenager had produced two children. Their daughters were six-months and three years old. The other nine girls in the house were also Stoltzfuses.

Mr. Kaplan was the only adult living in the Feasterville house. None of the girls had birth certificates or social security numbers.

Police officers booked Lee Kaplan into the Bucks County Jail on numerous offenses that included rape, statutory sexual assault, aggravated indecent assault, and corruption of minors. The twelve girls were placed into protective custody.

David and Savilla Stoltzfus were also taken into custody on charges of conspiracy of statutory sexual assault and child endangerment. Kaplan and the ex-Amish couple were all held on $1 million bond. Mr. Stolzfus told the police that when he gave up his children, he had no idea he was breaking the law. In fact, after researching the issue online, he was convinced the transfer was legal.

On Saturday, June 18, 2016, one of Kaplan's neighbors told a local reporter that she had complained about Lee Kaplan to the authorities three years ago. Kaplan's windows were boarded up and his yard was overgrown with uncut grass and weeds. According to this neighbor, the children were occasionally let out of the house, and when she did see them, "They were so sad and fearful. That's what made me call. I've been telling my husband for years that 'something isn't right.' " (This neighbor saw something, said something, and nothing happened.)

Another one of Lee Kaplan's neighbors in Feasterville told a reporter that Kaplan seemed "weird" and that the neighbor now wished he had called the police.

On June 18, 2016, police officers executed a search warrant at the Kaplan house. Officers also searched a greenhouse on the property where the long-haired, bearded resident grew Avocado trees. As officers searched the property, several chickens wandered about the place. Inside the house, officers discovered several air mattresses, a large catfish tank, and an elaborate and expensive model train layout. Following the search, the authorities impounded Lee Kaplan's two vehicles, a blue conversion van and a white sedan.

According to another neighbor, the girls were occasionally seen working in Kaplan's vegetable garden. He also took them to a nearby Dollar Store and a local hotdog restaurant. Kaplan and the oldest Stoltzfus girl, according to this witness, had been seen in public holding hands.

According to the Lower Southampton Township Public Safety Director, "We don't know if maybe there were babies born that were destroyed or whatever, but that's not the case as far as we can tell."

An investigation of the Stoltzfuses revealed that in 2001 Mr. Stoltzfus borrowed $300,000 from an Amish run institution called the Old Order Amish Helping Program. At the time, Mr. Stoltzfus operated a scrap metal business in the small Lancaster County town of Kirkwood. Eight years after taking out the loan to keep his business going, Stoltzfus lost the property to foreclosure. At this point he left the Amish faith, became a born again Christian, and sued the Old Order Amish Helping program for initiating the foreclosure and forcing him out of business. In his lawsuit, Mr. Stoltzfus claimed that the Amish wanted to close him down because they didn't approve of him doing business "with an individual of the Jewish faith named Lee Kaplan." A judge dismissed the Stoltzfus lawsuit a few months later.

The scrap metal business was sold at a sheriff's auction for $342,000. The Stoltzfuses, in 2011, filed for bankruptcy.

In digging into Lee Kaplan's past, investigators learned that he had graduated from Cheltenham High School in 1983. In 1994, he and his wife Virginia bought a house in the Melrose Park section of Cheltenham for $110,000, a place they worked hard to refurbish. Kaplan and his wife rented rooms in the house to students at a local university.

According to a Cheltenham man who had lived next door to the Kaplan and his wife from 1994 to 2003, Kaplan was "born again, but not as a Christian. He was a born again Jew--a Jew for Jesus."

In 2003, Lee Kaplan sold the house in Cheltenham for $250,000. Around this time he and his wife got divorced. After that, Kaplan drastically changed his looks by letting his hair and his beard grow out.

On June 6, 2017, a Bucks county jury found Lee Kaplan guilty of 17 counts of rape. According to the prosecutor, Kaplan had "brainwashed the Stoltzfus family, seeking "power, manipulation and control." The 47-year-old rapist will spend the rest of his life behind bars.

2 comments:

I feel so sorry for those children and what they went through. They were so badly treated by their parents and that evil Mr. Kaplan. I can't believe how long it took to figure out what he was doing. It seems suspicious that he rented out rooms to University students too. I wonder if something else will come out about that time and any crimes he may have committed at that time. The publicity of this case may bring some more truths out.

So glad to hear that this evil man was found guilty. This is a just verdict. He will now be in prison where he will never be able to hurt defenseless girls again. I just wish I could erase those awful experiences &memories for those girls.

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A graduate of Westminster College (Pennsylvania) and Vanderbilt University Law School, I am the author of twelve non-fiction books on crime, criminal investigation, forensic science, policing, and writing. I have been nominated twice for the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allen Poe Award in the Best Fact Crime Category. As a former FBI agent, criminal investigator, author, and professor of criminal justice at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, I have been interviewed numerous times on television and radio and for the print media.
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